The week-long hacking event, which saw just 50 youngsters take part in 2009, is fast gaining popularity and this year has the support of 50 local businesses around the country, acting as centers for the young coders to learn, hack and create using open-source government data under the guidance of experts and mentors. For Emma Mulqueeny, founder of Rewired State, the good news provides much-needed proof that there is in fact a desire in this country for such creative outlets.

"At the beginning, a lot of people said 'what's the point, why are you doing it?' They thought I was forcing poor kids to come and play in the government trough," Mulqueeny told Wired.co.uk. "Even in the developer community people were saying just let the kids come to it, don't force the issue."

After initially attracting just three participants back in 2009, Mulqueeny could have been forgiven for beginning to believe her critics. But she ploughed on and, after looking a little closer, discovered pockets of youths across the country desperate for exactly the kind of open creative space Rewired State offered.

"All these individual kids were stuck in their bedrooms. Something we kept hearing from schools was, 'no we don't teach coding because no one's smart enough, but oh yes, there's this one kid in the library.'"

After finally scraping together enough participants to fill the office space provided by Google for the weekend, Mulqueeny gathered her fifty teenagers—including one flown down from deepest darkest Scotland—for a few days of teaching, coding and invention. The results from these self-taught teens blew her away.

"These were bored, isolated kids that wanted to make stuff. That was the magic, to watch them blossom from being non-communicative and unsure whether what they were doing was any good, into massive show offs."

With past students returning as alumni mentors the community is growing and, according to Mulqueeny, so is the young coders' confidence.

Last year the 2011 winners created a selection of impressive apps including a pedestrian heat map which flags up congested areas, and a broadband data map plotting out high-speed zones. However, one entry in particular entry stood out for Mulqueeny, who relayed the story of the event's youngest entrant, a seven-year-old boy. On presenting his program to the panel on the final day he challenged a government judge because he had not been granted access to the Met Office data required to complete his app—a system that let students know whether or not they could cycle to school, depending on the forecast.

Ministers are apparently beginning to take note of this increasingly vocal group. Last year one government department came to Young Rewired State with a request. They were due to release some data and wanted to see how the developer community would engage with it and how they would choose to organise it. The community they chose was Young Rewired State.

"It's a very interesting societal change, the way people are engaging with young developers," says Mulqueeny. "By saying, 'we've got this data, it's about you, can you go and explore it please', their relationship with those kids is much more real than anything they could have achieved by sending out a press release and hoping the kids would read it."

"What organisations sometimes forget is these kids will grow up and some will be politicians, some will be civil servants and some will be the very people sitting there saying we must do something about this data," she added.

This year the prize-giving weekend will take place at Birmingham's Custard Factory, where participants present their final program after a mass sleepover. It's all free, so Mulqueeny has relied on donations made via peoplefund.it and sponsors (for example Google). Despite this year's encouraging turnout, Mulqueeny says the number of girls enrolling remains an issue. Around 15 percent initially sign up each year and 10 percent of these drop out before the event. After drawing attention to the issue, numbers plummeted even more, so there is definitely a lofty hurdle that needs to be crossed here.

Nevertheless, with numbers growing and the age of entrants dropping each year, Young Rewired State has proved there is a seemingly quiet community of young creators looking for opportunities just like this. An opportunity for them to prove they're not so quiet after all.

Meanwhile in the US, our public schools continue to fail our children by investing zero resources into early computer science skills.

If we want our kids to get exposure to programming early, we have to pay to send them to special programs or we have to teach them ourselves.

... or you could just get them a book and nudge them in the right direction. That's what happened with me. It doesn't take all that much.

Or the public schools that thousands of dollars of my property taxes go to fund each year could actually teach basic/beginning computer science to their students. There are computers in the classroom now, plenty of them, it's just that they are used for bullshit like PowerPoint in lieu of actual analytical/problem solving skills.

For a lot of kids, getting them a book and nudging them in the right direction is not enough...not with subjects like programming languages which are dynamic and require strong problem solving skills.

I am actually teaching my fifth grader Python right now....starting from scratch. She has zero prep in it, and part of the blame goes to the massive amounts of time she basically wasted in school learning little to nothing. She don't teach problem solving, they don't teach critical thinking, they don't teach risk taking...they only teach rule following. That's the core of the problem, and one of the key reasons that students are so disengaged.

Kray28's argument is one I'm going to have to agree with. Our public education is an absolute joke. Though I would be iffy on trusting the public education system on being able to teach something like Computer Science. I went to 5 different high schools back when I was growing up because I moved around a lot, and their local security was a joke. This typical trick worked for every school I went to, access the network shares and find the right workgroup.. you could have yourself an excel spreadsheet with every student's SSN. Not that I'd do anything with that, but that's just my way of pointing out that our public school system proves to be resistant towards "moving to the 21st century".

Honestly I think there should be a movement of sorts to encourage computing in the classroom, but without the use of stuff like the iPad. Seriously, would you want kids installing angrybirds on the iPad? It would most definitely have to be anything but the iPad if you want control and order on your systems. Steve Jobs once wrote an e-mail to a student going to Post University down in New York indicating that the iPad isn't for academic use. But alas, I just went on a rant. I just wanted you to know my thoughts and that I agree with your argument.

Meanwhile in the US, our public schools continue to fail our children by investing zero resources into early computer science skills.

If we want our kids to get exposure to programming early, we have to pay to send them to special programs or we have to teach them ourselves.

Maybe it's just me, but when I was in public high school from 1998 to 2002, I had HTML class freshman year, C++ sophomore and junior year, and Java senior year, not to mention taking a networking class junior and senior year that gave me my CCNA and A+ certs. This was not a "magnet school" either, many of which have even more extensive computer curricula. Our district in TX now even has one with a computer security program sponsored by the Air Force and NSA.

Local control means you can't make these generalizations very effectively; I recommend getting involved in your local system if you are passionate about providing this type of education at the HS level (or earlier!).

While I find Kray's argument to be a little brash and not quite tactful enough to sway some minds, I have to agree with the argument itself.

Not just in the US, but Canada as well I've taken some seriously terrible education on the college level and throughout school. The only classes that really pushed problem solving were the advanced math classes and Philosophy courses. My philosophy teacher put it best, in that the Schools don't Educate their students. Training is teaching kids what to think, and Educating is teaching kids how to think.

Case in point: My senior year math course was purely elective as a sort of university prep, and we spent half the time splitting into groups and using various skills (from entry calculus down to breaking problems down to triangles and Pythagoras) to solve some simple problems. The end result for us was never who got the answer, since that was a given. The end result was always the least actual work/thinking to get the answer, or the most creative and abstract.

Compare that to a programming class I took on C++ where we basically solved every problem by strings of goto or declaring variables outside of int(main) to avoid separate functions. While yes, we were "programming," it was an abomination for how C++ is meant to be handled.

To wrap it all up and go back to Kray's argument: We need a better way of educating our kids, because the public system is appalling. For some of the best Universities in the world according to various publications, the US isn't even in the top 20 for Math scores regarding teenagers.

Meanwhile in the US, our public schools continue to fail our children by investing zero resources into early computer science skills.

If we want our kids to get exposure to programming early, we have to pay to send them to special programs or we have to teach them ourselves.

... or you could just get them a book and nudge them in the right direction. That's what happened with me. It doesn't take all that much.

Or the public schools that thousands of dollars of my property taxes go to fund each year could actually teach basic/beginning computer science to their students. There are computers in the classroom now, plenty of them, it's just that they are used for bullshit like PowerPoint in lieu of actual analytical/problem solving skills.

For a lot of kids, getting them a book and nudging them in the right direction is not enough...not with subjects like programming languages which are dynamic and require strong problem solving skills.

I am actually teaching my fifth grader Python right now....starting from scratch. She has zero prep in it, and part of the blame goes to the massive amounts of time she basically wasted in school learning little to nothing. She don't teach problem solving, they don't teach critical thinking, they don't teach risk taking...they only teach rule following. That's the core of the problem, and one of the key reasons that students are so disengaged.

School boards have become too politicized. When boards are debating about ways to make creationism the curriculum, do you think they are bothered about teaching useless things like "problem solving, critical thinking, risk taking" etc?

Meanwhile in the US, our public schools continue to fail our children by investing zero resources into early computer science skills.

If we want our kids to get exposure to programming early, we have to pay to send them to special programs or we have to teach them ourselves.

Maybe it's just me, but when I was in public high school from 1998 to 2002, I had HTML class freshman year, C++ sophomore and junior year, and Java senior year, not to mention taking a networking class junior and senior year that gave me my CCNA and A+ certs. This was not a "magnet school" either, many of which have even more extensive computer curricula. Our district in TX now even has one with a computer security program sponsored by the Air Force and NSA.

Local control means you can't make these generalizations very effectively; I recommend getting involved in your local system if you are passionate about providing this type of education at the HS level (or earlier!).

I'd be interested in some real numbers there. I'm pretty sure you're in the minority, but all my evidence is anecdotal too. Some kind of proper study would be nice.

I had experience with several school systems in a couple different states just prior to and during that time period, and no one had any programming at all. For example, my high school had a computer lab that was only used to teach "Typing". A lot of other courses were required to spend maybe 4 or 5 hours per year in the lab, but it was mostly stuff like "use this to type up your English paper" or "be quiet and play Oregon Trail while I grade history exams". We were closer to computer programming when we used our graphing calculators in math class. The only scholarly exposure to programming I had prior to college was a bit of Logo courtesy of a gifted-and-talented class around 1987.

Hell, I had a friend attending another college from 1999-2003 who majored in computer science and graduated with less exposure than you got in high school. While I was learning C, C++, assembly, Java, HTML, Javascript, Perl, Lisp, and god knows what else, not to mention taking some pretty hairy required math courses, he spent 4 years coding in Visual Basic. That's all they did. We both had the same major, but we couldn't discuss it because he didn't understand 90% of what I was talking about. Granted, it was a liberal arts college (small but highly regarded) and not a school with a big tech focus, but still. If they can't even get it consistently right at the college level I find it hard to believe many high schools are doing a decent job.